I've spoken with Solarwinds staff about this before, but wanted to post it here to try and generate further interest. I'd like the ability to be able to put more than one poller on a single graph. This should encompass not only multiple pollers for a single host, but also multiple pollers from multiple hosts (for a summary-type view). A couple examples of how this would come in handy:

1. We have several interfaces that connect to our upstream providers. We currently use Cacti to put all those interfaces' traffic stats into a single graph, with each provider a different color. See pic for example. The graph shows both in/out with inbound traffic on the "positive" side and outbound traffic on the "negative" side.

2. I use Cacti to poll our DNS servers for failed queries vs. successful queries vs. NXDOMAIN responses. Putting them all into a single graph would not only save real estate on the page, but also make it much easier to see the differences in scale of all pollers. Same holds true for disk I/O read/writes - it doesn't make sense to have two separate graphs for this. Some might also want to poll other interface-based stats that aren't already polled by Orion, which have separate OIDs for in/out - another example of unnecessarily needing to create two graphs.

No, sorry. I still use Cacti for a lot of this type of graphing. Even though it's a pain in the a** to configure, it's much prettier and much more configurable. Custom polling needs a lot of work, such as the suggestions above, being able to manually set values such as upper limit, lower limit, scale, and units.

This is something I would also be interested in seeing - consolidating existing web console and/or custom poller data together would be incredibly useful as currently I also have to employ sicm/rrdtool to combine certain data.

Another vote for this feature here, along with the ability to easily add statistics of a number of load balanced interfaces together to represent the total traffic in one graph. We have active/active links to our WAN but a single bandwidth limit applied at the carrier, to be able to report and alert on this statistic we have to resort to alternative open source platforms - seriously, get it sorted

I agree. This "feature" has been a standard in open-source network monitoring applications for over 10 years. The lack of this "feature" among others in a high end product like Orion was unimaginable. I expected that the charts to be much more configurable. I find it disappointing. Please work on this.

From a use case perspective, I collect signal strength for our cell backup through a SNMP custom poller. Right now I have to click on each router to see this information. I'd love to have a composite graph on the home page that shows me this information so I can see quickly if any of them are above or below what we feel is our acceptable norm.

Another thing I'd like to be able to do is pin the scale down. We graph RSSI values and they range from -60 to -125 and Orion seems to be stuck on the idea that the graph must include the value 0 so instead of scaling them from -50ish to -130ish it scales it from 0 to -130 so half of the graph is always empty (but at least it graphs it...)

From a use case perspective, I collect signal strength for our cell backup through a SNMP custom poller. Right now I have to click on each router to see this information. I'd love to have a composite graph on the home page that shows me this information so I can see quickly if any of them are above or below what we feel is our acceptable norm.

Another thing I'd like to be able to do is pin the scale down. We graph RSSI values and they range from -60 to -125 and Orion seems to be stuck on the idea that the graph must include the value 0 so instead of scaling them from -50ish to -130ish it scales it from 0 to -130 so half of the graph is always empty (but at least it graphs it...)

Just as an FYI on this specific case, it is possible to put all of those graphs onto a single page/dashboard. I realize that isn't the same as in a single graph which I also would like to see but I though it might help.

My sales rep told me to expect this feature early next year. However, that was in late 2007 so you can I'd take any dates with a large grain of salt. Apparently it's more important for Solar Winds to come out with new tools and gain new customers rather than honor the repeated requests of existing customers.

Of course, I'm no longer in the "existing" category (found something cheaper and so far better) so you can chalk my complaints up to sour grapes.

We're about to do a blog post on what we're working on in the next few days. We'd love to get everyone's input once you've seen that list. There are a lot of top priorities (e.g. 1, 1a, 1b, 1c), but we believe we're working on a lot of your top requests ;-)

I'm personally most concerned with features like scalable administration, (user/node/custom poller), multiple pollers on a single graph and let's not forget SNMP table correlation. From a "my time" standpoint the administration issues are foremost, but for business intelligence for both large and small customers the graphing and table handling are paramount.

*sigh* Just as I feared none of the major shortcomings are being addressed, just a bunch of low hanging fruit that leave glaring fundamental capability holes intact. Just out of curiosity, why did you come into a thread called "Multiple pollers - one graph" and get everyone's hopes up when that's not at all part of this announcement?

Just tell the developers to download a free copy of Zenoss and Cacti and just copy everything they do for free! At the pricepoint an enterprise Orion deployment runs, they should have the resources to do it.

*sigh* Just as I feared none of the major shortcomings are being addressed, just a bunch of low hanging fruit that leave glaring fundamental capability holes intact. Just out of curiosity, why did you come into a thread called "Multiple pollers - one graph" and get everyone's hopes up when that's not at all part of this announcement?

I definitely hear your frustration and respect your opinion, but I don't think your tone is representative of the broader Orion user base. There are numerous top feature requests (e.g., AD integration, dependencies, service level groups, etc.) listed in the post that have gotten a lot of folks excited. Believe me, there were threads equal in length or in many times much longer (and spirited) than this one to include those features.

My goal for including the link was to ensure that folks on this thread understood that many of their other top feature requests ARE currently being worked on and that we're listening even if they aren't getting everything they want.

For you and others watching this thread, please do keep it alive and kicking with requests around this subject (include detailed use-cases) as this helps us raise the priority.

The things we're asking to get fixed mostly aren't big feature requests, but very obvious core functionality issues that anything calling itself an SNMP correlation engine should have pretty well nailed. Most of the smaller customers simply don't have any idea what they are missing, and most larger customers are so sick of hearing the "we hear you" treatment and no action to back it up. It's a level of frustration that is generally high enough to warrant loss of pleasantries. I have other things I love about the product.

The low-hanging fruit approach is great on paper, people asked, we delivered, etc. Auth even if it's AD based is a great step in the right direction for larger shops. Huge. It means I'll have to continue to support an AD infrastructure for very little good reason (time for ADAM, perhaps), but it's a great move. The problem is, 500 people might really want pretty maps on the home page, when 2 people want custom table correlation, joining and graphing, but the second feature is more intrinsic. 500 people might want the ability to email out PDF's, which are a gigantic waste of bandwidth, and I just want to be able to have scheduled CSV exports of custom reports I created in NPM and NCM. I want to be able to alert on data that's being shown in reports, but I can't figure out where to get it from.

I certainly don't expect SW to completely ignore the voices of the masses, the newer, smaller customers that want the bling, and don't notice the lack of substance, but it bothers me to no end to hear these features getting ignored release after release, all lip service and no action, for 3 years is ridonkulous.

Another critical feature that's been whispered about and no mention: The ability to compile our own MIB database. Every other SNMP collection product in the world provides this feature. It's nothing that needs to be re-invented. Destiny does it weekly, but then decides to "clean up" and strip out critical yet obscure enterprises without notification. How about those custom poller and trap alerts I had for my telephone switches that tell me if an trunk group carrying 3m minutes a day is down? Egregiously unacceptable. How about the ability to have custom pollers auto-assign based on multiple criteria during node addition? I need to be able to configure standing orders and minimize the care and feeding of the product. How about interfaces that randomly go into unknown status all the time?

How about the ability to graph interfaces in aggregate? A bunch of good work has been done on traps and syslog, but it needs to go further.

How about granular user authorization/authentication and a full-passthrough of credentials from NPM to NCM?

How about node import templates, user creation templates, and the ability to import csv files in through those templates to provision nodes, users, and even alerts. There are a bunch of alerts that due to limitations in the product, are painful to create for different events (traps, syslog, and custom pollers), I'd like to be able to create templates and import the variables in CSV format instead of all the point and click BS. Even copying alerts, exporting / importing actions, etc, it's painful as hell to manage and add to weekly. Now along with that, I'd like reports that both summarize and detail both my alert definitions, but also alerts on a per-node basis, counts, counts of traps/syslog, etc.

I'm sure there is more, but that's as big of a chunk as I feel like regurgitating at the moment.

With every release, we do our best to include as many features as we can and to ensure that they represent what most customers are asking for. Unfortunately, no matter what we pick to include, we're inevitably going to disappoint some people. We think our approach works for most, but we can definitely understand why folks whose top features aren't included are upset.

Overall, in my short time as a SolarWinds customer, I've seen a lot of good things. You guys seem genuinely interested in your customers.

As for the what's on tap posting, there are a few things on that list we wanted, which is really great news. But I do agree with the majority here who think a tool like NCM that is version 10 and does not have what we see as basic capabilities is slightly insane. And I'm going to try to keep this focused on the forum topic, although there are other areas we'd like to see addressed as well.

Putting multiple pollers on a graph or "easily" putting multiple graphs on one page to create dashboards or having graphs in reports (trending,etc) is what we would consider network monitoring 101.

That AD integration and dependencies are finally arriving is great news, it will ease some of the Orion management pain. But we need to have these other basic issues addressed in the very short term. The look on my associates and managements faces when I show them an Orion report that it just a bunch of numbers says it all. We've got vendors beating down the door that can demo their bling bling interfaces and we've got to justify over and over why Orion is a good and the right investment. Just give us a little bling, please.

For what it is worth, I absolutely hate posting comments like this on forums, because our overall impression of SW and the tools you provide is positive. But it seems like this is the ordained method for feedback.

John

Overall, in my short time as a SolarWinds customer, I've seen a lot of good things. You guys seem genuinely interested in your customers.

As for the what's on tap posting, there are a few things on that list we wanted, which is really great news. But I do agree with the majority here who think a tool like NCM that is version 10 and does not have what we see as basic capabilities is slightly insane. And I'm going to try to keep this focused on the forum topic, although there are other areas we'd like to see addressed as well.

Putting multiple pollers on a graph or "easily" putting multiple graphs on one page to create dashboards or having graphs in reports (trending,etc) is what we would consider network monitoring 101.

This is very well put and I agree with it 100%. There are certain things which should just work out of the box and this is one of them. So is a simple page with multiple interface graphs on it. These are things that make us continue to use Cacti and MRTG, which I've been wishing to get rid of for years. I am very excited about many of the new features you guys are working on, but Meru Wireless integration? Really? How many customers could possibly be using Meru Wireless devices that it's considered a "top priority" when a couple of relatively "simple" enhancements like this get overlooked.

I know I started this thread two years ago and multiple people have tagged that they want this functionality. It really is "network monitoring 101", considering that it's something that MRTG has done since I started working with it in 1998. It's now 2010 and the leader of network monitoring applications doesn't have this very basic functionality? As much as I hate to say it, I'd strongly suggest downloading a copy of Cacti and seeing why I both need to keep it around and why I need to get rid of it. I mean, I am running a separate server *just* for multiple pollers in a single graph capability. How insane is that?

Thanks for staying on this, we too would like/need to have this functionality, so add my voice to th chorus.

Orion has moved from a simple monitoring tool to a powerful diagonistics tool, we have the need to present diverse information in consolidated ways. I have spend a large amount of time creating custom pages to do this (see Attached)

If we could have an easier way of presenting this, it would add a huge value to the Orion product but I would like to see a common graphing engine for all modules with common controls and look and feel.

It's true Orion is superior to cacti/nagios in so many ways, I am frustrated that those zelots harp on relitivly minor issues to knock Orion down.

Orion XXX is not superior to Cacti in Cacti's areas of core competency. If it was, nobody'd be bitching. Try out Cacti's graphing sometime.

And which Orion are you talking about? NPM? APM? NCM? All 3 products have some excellent functionality and some glaring holes in functionality that have been known for years and ignored. SW needs to be a little bit less reactive and a little bit more proactive about dealing with these ancient, well documented issues.

Zealotry is apparently not confined to us open source enthusiasts either.

Nagios would essentially correlate to APM. It's a far more developed tool for monitoring applications, although Nagios administration and config file structure is completely focacta.

I agree with you, SW should be addressing these issues if it is going to effectively compete. Also the zealotry comment wasn't aimed externally or personally at you, I have internal factions who completely refuse to acknowledge any value in commercially developed software at all and will implement open source to the detrement of the business systems with the justification that it's "free".

As for superiority, we have a dynamic infrastructure, if a system is technically superior but is more difficult to implement, maintain, manage, and scale, to the point that it is not kept current, then its value is diminished.

So if I'm a Certified MVP, then I'm a zealot; but our Solarwind system is monitoring ten times the systems with ten times the data and requires ten times less resource to do it.

And while I have a definite love of open source, I don't think it's the only valid tool in the toolbox, nor do I believe the world would be better if commercial software companies didn't exist.

Really, going commercial vs open source is about expectation.

There is a reasonable expectation that if you run open source software, that your support resources are best effort, that people who develop the product may or may not care about your specific needs, and access to them, if available at all, is usually on some sort of a pay as you go model.

There is also a reasonable expectation that if you pay a hefty amount of money for a commercial product, that the company you're paying the money to, is responsible for a number of things to varying degrees of accountability:

1. Continue to enhance and develop the product - this is the #1 justification for software "maintenance" costs, to keep development afloat. I would rate SW at about 3 out of 10 on this point. Yes, there's a lot of activity, but it seems that most of it isn't aimed at fixing any critical core functionality issues, as far as I can tell, if there's a pile of trash taking up the slot in the feature chart that works for 1/10th of the more advanced use cases, then SW considers the issue closed. Scheduling PDF reports makes it in, but scheduling CSV reports doesn't. That blows me away, when the process should be, there's a scheduler, and SW ties in the same export formats available in the application.

2. Develop solutions to workflow issues, fix glaring deficiencies in functionality, and listen to qualified customer feedback. I rate SW at about 2 of 10 in this department.

3. Provide support in the event of issues, conduct Q/A and interoperability testing, and deliver (mostly) unbroken software. 10 has gone a lot better than 9.5 did, so I'll give SW a 7 out of 10 on that one.

4. Take one of your best dev guys, put him to work on these features, give him enough time/additional resources to attack even *one* of these issues every release. Considering the amount of money that the larger customers represent, while it may not compare to the amount of smaller customers, I'm absolutely certain that the software maintenance renewals every year would easily pay for a team of 3 developers to focus on these kinds of features. One guy if he's really good could nail one, and sometimes two on every release, including digesting all of the comprehensive use case scenarios, figuring out how to implement them, doing the implementation, and sending it off to QA for the next release. Sometimes, stuff won't make it in, sometimes 2-5 things will. Get out of tunnel-vision mode and step back for the 50000' view.

5. Take Orion suite integration more seriously. Cirrus/NCM/whatever - where's the pass-through authentication? Either make NCM able to look at two different databases so it can figure out auth from NCM, or build the new version of NCM as both a standalone product using it's own broken auth, with a configuration option to tell it to use NPM's, which with the AD integration, has just gotten a lot more robust.

6. My biggest beef with SW's policy of listening only to the masses, is that the masses are relatively small companies. Also, when it comes time to add a new feature, SW tends to be overly targeted. Come on guys, this is your product. When any customer starts talking about feature requests, and you start a dialog about it, take into consideration what they are looking for, and also look at how you can make it better/more robust. Look at what exists in the open source and how you can tap that collective consciousness and maybe even innovate something better, so instead of being far worse or a loosely judged tie, the product you're selling actually exceeds what's available in open source. A lot of the smaller shops probably haven't run into a use case that makes them interested in the more serious features, you don't know what you don't know. This is your business, you're supposed to be able to see beyond that.

This is your company, and your product. Less hype and more meat. Less lip service, and more customer service. I know how much you guys love all these fluff features, but alerting, more robust UnDP, including support for tables that doesn't involve picking a column, table joins, so I can pull labels from one table, and data I want to graph, monitor, and alert on from another table, keyed to a column in both. Maintenance window blackouts, parent/child relationships, node import, validation bypass, and custom property population by API or provide some SQL import scripts that handle it. I'm rolling my own to populate custom properties in the nodes and interfaces tables. Alerts unfortunately aren't nearly as straightforward when you take into account the (at least 6, from what I've figured out so far) the tables and modifications necessary for

You guys have great resources in-house for this, all over your backline support. One guy I'd listen to more than anyone is Matt (I forget his last name). The guy knows more about the product, and how to make the product handle different use cases than anyone I've ever talked to. The fact is, the smallest customers would have varying degrees of benefit from most of the feature requests that the larger customers make. Multiple Pollers on a graph.. I feel like it's beating a dead horse to even mention it again, but I am absolutely certain even the smallest customers would be grateful for that feature. Table joining, correlation, and graphing of multiple columns in a table in one graph, would benefit absolutely everyone. Enhanced authentication and more granular restrictions. I'd like to be able to give someone the ability to see mostly all nodes, but only "manage" specific nodes within that larger chunk. This has little to no benefit for a 40-station windows network with 3 switches and a router, but there are a lot of people for whom these larger customer feature requests fall into the "nice to have" category where they would find use for them, but aren't in the "need to have" category like the smaller customers.

Vision, transparency, accountability, and customer service. That's what I, and other customers are looking for. While there has been progress with how SW handles these things, more focus on this is still required. I don't care what business you're in, every company that exists is a customer service organization.

Very well put, Peter. I'd add to the list of core functionality fixes the mysterious copy/paste crashing issue when using RDP to connect to the NPM server. It's been talked about many times before and quite often replicated by customers, but somehow, it's still not fixed since I first started using Orion.

Well put and I agree, your contribution to this board is a clear indication that your purpose is to make Orion a better product. Converstaions like this should be a wake up call to product management to build the core from a good system into a great system. I would like to suggest a greater interaction with the customer, I for one have been contacted twice buy SW to give input to future developments, but it seemed it was more about what they wanted to show me then see what I needed. Anyway, off the soap box and back to work.

I'm curious about the 10 times the systems with ten times the data and ten times less resources.

I will say that I can wholeheartedly blame the performance of my installation on the database server, it's not adequate and it's replacement is already online, just not ready to cut over to. I also understand that should be getting better with 10, which can't be deployed until it's properly QA'd, and that unfortunately means poring through everything with a fine toothed comb.

Right now I'm doing about 200 nodes and 5500 elements if I include custom pollers on 3.3GB of RAM on both the database and the poller. Netflow cannot be turned on :(, but I'm well aware of why.

The new poller and database server both have 12GB, DL360G6 for the poller, and 380G6 for the database. I spend about 40% of my time on Orion right now, trying to get it to do things it's resistant to doing.

Right now I'm doing about 200 nodes and 5500 elements if I include custom pollers on 3.3GB of RAM on both the database and the poller. Netflow cannot be turned on :(, but I'm well aware of why.

The new poller and database server both have 12GB, DL360G6 for the poller, and 380G6 for the database. I spend about 40% of my time on Orion right now, trying to get it to do things it's resistant to doing.

Peter

We were using those same system types DL360 (x2 Pollers) and DL380 (database). We just recently built a VMWare infrastructure utilizing 3 DL360's and visualized my polling engines. My two polling engines now share a resource pool of 750MHz of CPU and is running great (that includes APM). We kept the database on the physical system.

I would be interested to hear what types of things you are spending your time with in Orion... however; maybe that is more appropriate for an offline discussion or a different thread.

A response like that would be valid if basic core functionality wasn't ignored release after release. What I'm asking for shouldn't be viewed as feature requests, so much as making basic core functionality inline with standard offerings. You Product folks need to spend more time looking at the product objectively, and less time giving lip service.

I fully understand the needs of the many philosophy. I'll go out on a limb and say that probably more than half of us have seen "Star Trek: The Search for Spock".

The problem I have is that people have been bitching about a serious, obvious, and often seemingly insane set of issues, that keep getting ignored, release after release.

The only conclusion I can safely draw is that Solarwinds as a company, and individually through it's employees, doesn't take the needs of larger scale customers seriously.

People ask for critical features over and over, and SW's Product team responds like Catherine Tate's Lauren character: "Does my face look bovered?"

It's a sick game where we, as customers, thinking that we have spent enough on a broken product suite and it's annual 20% to warrant being heard and responded to, and while SW pretends that's what's going on, empirical evidence would suggest otherwise. Remember the conference call of over a year ago where you, and the other Product managers sat there and told my boss and I to our faces that while you couldn't be sure, and couldn't make any commitment on exactly when, that it was reasonable to expect by the end of the year we'd have something functional to make the administration overhead less of a burden. Guess what, nothing but lip service. It's 6 months past that deadline.

SW as a company simply doesn't have any credibility at all, when it comes to the needs of larger business. Replacing it is painful and expensive, but potentially worth it to be in business with a company that is actually responsive. Every other vendor we have doesn't do business like SW. Cisco, Juniper, Adtran, and others work with us in a genuine fashion to address our business needs.

I too, dislike using a public forum to voice such things, but whether voiced privately or publicly, the truth remains the same.

Every other vendor we have doesn't do business like SW. Cisco, Juniper, Adtran, and others work with us in a genuine fashion to address our business needs.

Peter

I'd love to have your sway with the above-listed companies. There are some basic features we've been begging for in all those vendors' various equipment and we've been ignored for years. I've found the complete opposite - unless you are an AT&T or Verizon who needs a very specific feature that no one else on the face of the planet needs, then you are going to get the cold shoulder.

I personally think that SW is much more responsive to their customers than any of those companies, at least in my experience. It is just frustrating when there are seemingly "simple" features being requested that Orion or NCM doesn't have that free software has and has been doing for years. I have THREE network monitoring applications running on my network, all of which perform similar functions. I've been running NPM since version 5, I believe, so that shows you how long I've been waiting to get rid of these other applications.

I count no less than 17 customers asking for this feature to be included in the next version. One of those is a reseller claiming his customers are asking for it to be included. I'm not sure how large each of these SW customers' installations are, but I'm sure if you add them all up, it equals a pretty penny in yearly maintenance costs. As much as you don't want to hear it, I'm sure some of these customers are going to vote with their wallets when it's time to renew maintenance and ask themselves, "What is it that I'm really getting with this 5-figure number for yearly maintenance?"

And, I hate to latch onto this, but a search for 'Meru' on the forums elicits only postings in the Content Exchange from some guy who seemingly works at Meru. WTF? I know in the grand scheme of things, this feature is probably a very small part of the resources devoted to the next version, but c'mon.

If I could remind both of you that we have a policy against profanity and both of you have words-of-interest that qualify (yes, even in acronym form). If they had been much stronger, I would have been forced to delete your posts b/c we do not edit posts.

We welcome the passion of your critiques, but please, let's keep them as clean as possible.

If I could remind both of you that we have a policy against profanity and both of you have words-of-interest that qualify (yes, even in acronym form). If they had been much stronger, I would have been forced to delete your posts b/c we do not edit posts.

We welcome the passion of your critiques, but please, let's keep them as clean as possible.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement, but okay. I've seen worse on the forums and never seen a public dressing down of a user. The things either of us said were nothing you wouldn't hear on daytime or primetime TV. We are all adults here and it's not like either of these posts were laced with the type of profanity you'd find at an Andrew Dice Clay performance. Nobody is ready to go all postal on Solarwinds here. In fact, both of us are touting the great features and functionality of SW products, but merely pointing out some flaws. I find this to be pointless nitpicking. No one is getting angry here and we don't need riot control.

I'm personally most concerned with features like scalable administration, (user/node/custom poller), multiple pollers on a single graph and let's not forget SNMP table correlation. From a "my time" standpoint the administration issues are foremost, but for business intelligence for both large and small customers the graphing and table handling are paramount.

Peter

I couldn't agree more (especially graphing and table handling) but then again my tone apparently doesn't reflect the broader user base.

Just to give you an update, not sure if you saw my blog post Request for feedback – multiple interfaces and UnDP on charts, but I was able to squeeze some stuff into the next release around this functionality. If if you have active maintenance and want to kick the tires and give me feedback, send me a PM via thwack as we are about to release beta3 which has this feature in it.

Awesome. I'm dying for it. I have the new system in place, waiting for migration from our current 9.5.1 installation, and this would be awesome to be able to get in line prior to transition. Will this beta be upgradable to RC versions and the release or will it require a nuke and re-pave?

Never give up, even though sometimes it may take a little while to get into the product, we are listening. This feature was included in 10.1. We just have a lot of stuff on the list, we get tons of feedback on thwack alone, along with the conversations myself and the other PM's have here with many of you.

Those are both items on our hit list we for sure want to add. I was only able to get certain items into 10.1 so based on threads like this and conversations with folks I focused on the primary use cases, which were interfaces. As a temp "escape hatch" I had UnDP's added as well.

Once we get the next release locked down we will post the what we are working on post.

+1 on this feature. I need to be able to graph multiple data points either from snmp polling or apm polling. I know it can be done because I have graph with multiple snmp datapoints (although they all come from a one snmp table).

Hear Hear!! I've been asking for this feature from our sales staff since we became an Orion customer nearly 3 years ago. Everytime I get "wait for the next release" which I do and am always disappointed.

I too come form a MRTG/Cacti background and see putting multiple values on a single chart as trivial, basic, and vital.

This missing yet basic feature, along with the missing ability to create ad hoc tables from polled data (seriously?) are pushing us away from Orion quickly. Our maintenance is up next month and frankly, we're considering not re-upping. 2+ years is simply too long to wait for what are standard features in nearly all other monitoring tools.

After 6 months, that might mean something. It's been nearly two years that I've been asking for it, and in discussions about Network Management, the shortcomings of Orion are beginning to mean something. If I have to maintain another system to get the functionality I need, or multiple other systems to get the data displayed the way I need to to be and alerted on, there's little point in maintaining the not-so-terribly inconsiderable investment in SolarWinds' software.

This is merely one of many long-outstanding necessary features that exist elsewhere for SolarWinds' to see as a guideline for necessary feature development. I can honestly say there aren't any enhancements in 9.x that have anything to do with my business needs, and it may be time to make a business decision. For the moment, the lack of functionality is merely annoying, shortly, it will be debilitating and require action, I'd suspect by the end of 2010.

For the record, lack of multiple pollers on one graph merely makes it painful to see the data, I still have all the data, and I can see it, if I scroll through enough slow-loading graphs. There are other considerably more pressing concerns when it comes to NMS data, custom pollers on a graph is merely one of many, and probably #5 or 6 on the critical list.

I agree with you 100% - it's a shame that Orion does not have this ability. I asked Mark Wigans the same questions some months ago in a different post, never got any reply.

It seems Solarwinds is chasing whatever feature is cool today, and they're still lacking in my opinion important features in the core product that should have been developed years ago. One should be able to display multiple pollers and values in a custom chart with ease in a product like Orion that is no longer either small or cheap.

You are all missing the most important thing here. We will have Meru Wireless support in the next version. MERU WIRELESS SUPPORT, GUYS! IT'S WHAT WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR ALL THESE YEARS!!! This feature was obviously high priority and asked for by thousands of customers, none of which apparently posted on the forums...anywhere...but it's higher priority than multiple pollers in one graph, because nobody except extreme fringe cases would want to do something so wild and crazy!

I very much look forward to having Meru Wireless support. Thank goodness this feature is finally being put into Orion. I was beginning to lose sleep over the fact that I couldn't easily graph my Meru Wireless devices without making a bunch of custom UnDP templates. My nightmare is finally over. I hope you'll join me in the praises of the product manager who finally put this feature into Orion 10 and made it one of the highest priority features. I was going to post on the forums that I wanted this feature, but it must have been such high priority that no one else posted about it, asking for it publicly, and I assumed that SW knew that we were all clamoring for it. In fact, I was going to post years ago that I'd sell tickets to my own grandmother's brutal beating just to see this functionality in Orion. But now I don't have to do that because it's going to be there! YAY! Please rush this version out the door because I desperately need the high priority Meru Wireless feature set, just like all the other hundreds of non-posts asking for this high priority feature.

Have I gotten my point across? I like the SW products and for the most part, they do the job for us. Sure, there's some disappointments, but I've always overlooked them because SW administration saves me a lot of time when compared against Cacti or MRTG in our environment. However, it really ticks me off to be told that all these issues were the highest priority issues when I don't see one single post from anyone asking for Meru Wireless support in the next Orion. You have several threads asking for this feature, most notably this one, and it's ignored and "sent to the PM", which I've seen tons of times and rarely does any suggestion about core functionality actually make it into the product.

I'm not sure why anyone even bothers requesting enhancements like this from Solarwinds. It's obvious these requests will never be addressed with anything other than "We're *planning* on adding it to the next release" or "I don't think that's representative of our user-base". So really, what's the point? The fact is, no matter how much you want to believe NPM, APM, or whaeverPM, is a mature "enterprise" product, their biggest claim to fame is that they have a user-driven support forum with over 38,000 users. WOW. It was one of the biggest selling points during our evaluations. Since the IPO, the company is nothing more than a musical chair for failing executives riding the cash cow BOD train. I wouldn't plan on seeing any real change with the product for the next 10 years -- if you've ever taken a peak at the DB design you might understand why there are so many failings on the presentation layer, and why it might take 10 years to fix Isn't it sad how software like Cacti, with a handful of active developers, can be so much more superior to most "enterprise" software? I love it.

DB design is by far the most ignored enhancement. It should be at the top of the list above all enhancements... I Remember hearing in one of Josh's web-casts that 60 to 70% of all support calls reference the DB and or DB Performance. With that said Solarwinds should be looking into a database design that breaks down tables into smaller chunks via Table Partitioning. This would save everyone time and $$ both on the support side and customer side. Not to mention the huge performance gain everywhere in the application/web. I am sure the attempt of the "detailed", "hourly" and "Daily" tables helped everyone but this needs looked at again.

I'm not sure why anyone even bothers requesting enhancements like this from Solarwinds. It's obvious these requests will never be addressed with anything other than "We're *planning* on adding it to the next release" or "I don't think that's representative of our user-base". So really, what's the point? The fact is, no matter how much you want to believe NPM, APM, or whaeverPM, is a mature "enterprise" product, their biggest claim to fame is that they have a user-driven support forum with over 38,000 users. WOW. It was one of the biggest selling points during our evaluations. Since the IPO, the company is nothing more than a musical chair for failing executives riding the cash cow BOD train. I wouldn't plan on seeing any real change with the product for the next 10 years -- if you've ever taken a peak at the DB design you might understand why there are so many failings on the presentation layer, and why it might take 10 years to fix Isn't it sad how software like Cacti, with a handful of active developers, can be so much more superior to most "enterprise" software? I love it.

I don't think that's an entirely fair statement. Cacti is not 1/4 the tool NPM is on many levels. Core feature of many opensource products in terms of presentation of complex data and proper handling of SNMP data for alerting, even if it comes from a table, is crucial and currently broken in SW and superior elsewhere.

It doesn't necessarily indicate an overall superiority, just a specific one. The lack of Product's ability to address these issues in any sort of a reasonable fashion is a completely fair issue to pound on though. It's been more than long enough.

I don't think that's an entirely fair statement. Cacti is not 1/4 the tool NPM is on many levels. Core feature of many opensource products in terms of presentation of complex data and proper handling of SNMP data for alerting, even if it comes from a table, is crucial and currently broken in SW and superior elsewhere.

It doesn't necessarily indicate an overall superiority, just a specific one. The lack of Product's ability to address these issues in any sort of a reasonable fashion is a completely fair issue to pound on though. It's been more than long enough.

Peter

No one said anything about being fair! How am I suppose to vent and be objective at the same time? This "product" is absolute anti-greatness. Look, it's not rocket science. We want to collect some data... we want to report some data. This concept is not some strange esoteric data voodoo being invented by the Solarwinds development team. It's called Relational Database Design and SW's implementation is EPIC fail. "CPULoad_Daily"? Seriously? They modeled an entire table for that? "APM_ComponentStatus_Detail" and "CustomPollerStatistics_Detail". Why?! I think SW's idea of normalization was making the UI a little nicer looking.

As far as what NPM does well... I can't find one thing that NPM can perform that other solutions like AppManager, Tivoli, OpenNMS, ZENWorks, or even *HOSTMON* can't also provide. SW needs a wake up call...

I attempt to vent and be objective at the same time, it's a strange need I realize.

I agree that there are many "anti-greatness" "features" of the product.

I also totally agree that the vast majority of what anyone *might* want to do with an SNMP collector / correlation engine is either missing entirely or very broken in the product. I don't know enough about database design to knock SW's, but certainly many things in the DB are somewhat less than straightforward. Last I heard, they were working on fixing that to lay the groundwork for more changes.

APM and UnDP's actually need critical work, although I haven't tried out APM for a version or two, because it was useless when I tried initially.

UnDP's on the other hand, are a constant source of pain, agony, and frustration. The simplistic use-cases that it actually works for are too manual, and too limited to be *really* useful unless the data you're trying to pull is a single, simplistic OID. God forbid you have a MIB that defines a table, or you're stuck in a pile of crapplication software that has you cursing the state of Texas, and especially Austin, which is completely wrong, Austin deserves a medal for existing in Texas.

Honestly, random feature bashing is getting old. The real problem here is a management one, not a technological one. These features can be worked on, they just aren't.

For literally every single SW software product I own, I have at least 1 or 2 critical bugs in existing functionality and at least 3 features requests that have sat on the ignore pile for nearing 3 years. The former is shameful, the latter is unfortunate. I don't ask for frivolous features.

SW continues with the mushroom treatment, and acts like it's a substitute for action. Enough already.

Both of you sound as though you feel that the SW products are completely not meeting your needs? I am curious why you haven't moved to a different solution?

I ask because this feels as though it has become an Orion bashing session versus constructive feedback opportunity. I am guessing that maybe this is because you both like the product for the most part and are just extremely frustrated that it's missing a few key component to be a much greater product for you?

I am not trying to dismiss you frustrations as I completely agree with them, all of your points on this missing functionality is completely validated. I also came from products like OpenNMS and Cacti that use RRD for graphing and more dynamic reporting so I feel the pain of no longer having that functionality. I also agree that being able to pull your data together and display it in a graph that you can control is at the heart of the relational database concept.

I also don't necessarily agree that all of the new features they include are low hanging "marketing" fruit. The UnDP for example was a much needed enhancement, while not as useful as it could be if we had Multiple Datapoints in a Single Graph, it was still a necessary "core" feature. Many of the features I have requested have been added to the product or are in development (I have seen mock-ups already) which are the types of things I have had as "core" with other NMS systems such as OpenNMS, HP OpenView, Manage Engine, What's Up Gold, etc.

What I am trying to understand is how the rest of the product is working for you and if not why you are still using it?

Also, what would you guys think if SolarWinds not only let us put in feature requests (as they do now), but also implemented a system where each of their current maintenance customers had a pool of points they could use to put toward any feature on the list (once the feature was implemented you would get those spent points back). This would give us more of a voice on what is top priority for us. This is a system I have seen used in other places and thought it may be a good option for SolarWinds.

Just wanted to solicit your thoughts on some of this stuff, thanks guys!

2. Relatively performant considering alleged database shortcomings, which I'm not qualified to have a real opinion about, I don't know anything about database design, nor do I pretend to on TV.

3. There is a lot of functionality in the product, it's just missing some key things. Now, I don't care about blackout windows, but I could totally agree that it makes huge sense. I just turn shut down my MTA when I'm doing something spammy, and that keeps the phones and Outlook from blowing up. Good times.

4. The presentation is pretty good, overall. The web interface is pretty well designed, and for things that don't hammer the database, relatively performant despite being overtaxed, this gets better with v10 and massively better hardware. I'm excited.

5. The support team is really coming along. Used to be years ago, it was small and tight, and other than a rare exception here and there, calling into Austin was decent. Then it expanded, and even though I swear I should get coverage at 2pm on Friday afternoon, PDT, apparently no rollover last week. When I can contact them, after validating basic things, I get solutions to complex issues the product wasn't designed to do sometimes, and other times, issues resolved. Right now I have a couple that aren't resolved, but until I'm running 10, I may be stuck. I can accept that. There are a couple of guys in support who I owe some beers to, should I ever find myself in Austin The lower tiers use of the backline support and Tier 3 is really solid, much better than it used to be. Honestly, the support guys and girls are all pretty great. I could make honorable mention, but I'll skip it for now.

6. The promise of a really tightly integrated suite of products. I want NCM integration to be as tight as APM and NetFlow, just like another module. It's not there yet. I'd like to be able to set permissions and have them fully respected by all the modules, at least in 9.5.1, not there yet. I'd like more granular permissions in general, probably involving adding a column to the nodes and interfaces tables, pretty straightforward. Oh wait, I kind of do that with custom properties so far, but it's far from complete, and custom properties on interfaces can/will be ignored for things like syslog, traps, and Netflow. I don't want someone to see the parent node, just 3 individual interfaces.

Harder than you would think to accomplish. So many resources on my network summary home ignore node and interface limitations. Netflow is the worst offender.

7. Alerting based off polling is pretty decent. Coupled with a UnDP, if you're pulling status from an OID that returns a single value, between transforms and data types, it's pretty damn flexible. I'm not gonna lie, I'm pretty much satisfied with that functionality. The problems come in with tables, not being able to update my own MIBs, and any situation beyond single value OID response. Syslog/Trap alerting is all changing when I start using 10, I haven't tested each one individually, but I will before I move over to it. It's a business requirement to make sure the transition is smooth.

8. I see progress in the product. I hear rumors occasionally about something cool that is rumored to be on the list to develop sometime. I see the product of easily becoming much more than it is today, and being indispensable to my and many other organizations. I've heard Product people talk about DB changes in every release and a migration to an architecture that will allow some of these features I'm asking for, but I'm not seeing it happen in any sort of timeframe that helps me, so I'm a bit upset.

I'd love the points system, as long as it's scaled based on something like licensed products owned, and what size. I don't think an NPM 100 customer should have the same voice as SLX or multiple SLX. The majority may still swing towards a different direction, but the process would be transparent, which is another beef I have with SW.

I am absolutely positive I'm not the biggest license holder around here, and I am not even considering resellers in that mix. Still, I'm confident that most of the things that are on my "Need to Have" list also have a place on the lists of others who use the product in a similar way that I do, especially at any volume, with diverse data collection and correlation needs. We're just in the early stages of starting to go off-board for things we simply can't do, but it's not really a road I want to go down.

I also greatly desire my administration overhead to go down. Every detail we need to know to provision nodes, interfaces, users, and custom properties is stored in a database. I need to be able to flow that information through. A configurable CSV import filter would work, but finishing the API up for being able to write values is high on the list. SOAP/xml it is? So be it. Need write capability ;)

I'm not sure why anyone even bothers requesting enhancements like this from Solarwinds. It's obvious these requests will never be addressed with anything other than "We're *planning* on adding it to the next release" or "I don't think that's representative of our user-base". So really, what's the point? The fact is, no matter how much you want to believe NPM, APM, or whaeverPM, is a mature "enterprise" product, their biggest claim to fame is that they have a user-driven support forum with over 38,000 users. WOW. It was one of the biggest selling points during our evaluations. Since the IPO, the company is nothing more than a musical chair for failing executives riding the cash cow BOD train. I wouldn't plan on seeing any real change with the product for the next 10 years -- if you've ever taken a peak at the DB design you might understand why there are so many failings on the presentation layer, and why it might take 10 years to fix Isn't it sad how software like Cacti, with a handful of active developers, can be so much more superior to most "enterprise" software? I love it.

Wow, it's like you read my mind 12 months ago. I've been a user of Solar Winds products for nearly 15 years. Back in the day they produced crappy looking but awesome tools for Windows net admins. Netmaper, Visual Ping, router watch, etc were the only network tools available on WinNT or Win95 and they brought a lot of Windows admins into the network fold (where they eventually learned CLIs and then stopped using SW's Engineering tools, but I digress). Sometime in the last 5 years or so however, SW has gone from a maker of quality (but crappy looking) engineering tools to a marketing company. In 4 years we've had 5 different sales teams. The focus has obviously switched from tools to sales. Of course those of us who are requesting basic features get ignored because we don't represent as much revenue as a new customer. It's as simple as that. You know, "why should I have two blowout preventers when one borked one works most of the time?"

In the name of all that is holy please figure out how to graph information from multiple nodes on a single graph.

I too also liked the ugly tools. They do what I want and that's why I bought them. This workplace studio thing isn't something I asked for or expected and I have tried it several times but it feels too bulky. I hope SW never gets rid of the individual lightweight tools.

SW should do what they feel is best for their business. I believe our Orion maintenance has been expired for at least 6 months. I think the powers that be didn't feel that there was much there for us in version 10. The multiple pollers in one graph issue is the top of our list.

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